Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Aafia closed her e-mail with a quotation from the Quran familiar to Deobandis and Salafists: “O you who believe! Take not the Jews and Christians for protecting friends (auliyaa’). They are the protecting friends of one another. Whoever among you takes them for protecting friends is (one) of them. Indeed, Allah does not guide the wrongdoing people.”

  A few weeks later, on April 19, 1995—with Ramzi Yousef and his coconspirators in the World Trade Center bombing already on trial in New York—a huge bomb exploded at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 small children, and injuring more than 600 others. The bomb was similar in composition to Ramzi Yousef’s. Like Yousef’s, moreover, it was delivered in a rented truck, leading investigators to suspect at first that Yousef and Al-Kifah were behind the attack. On April 23, the FBI listened in while the officers of Care International and Global Relief held a worried meeting about the crackdown in Pakistan. “Some brothers are nervous in Boston,” one man said. Aafia’s MIT supervisor informed her around this time that some FBI agents had visited the university’s computer office looking for her.

  Aafia stayed away from work after that. She packed an assortment of U.S. military manuals she had been collecting for the mujahideen and mailed them to her mother in Pakistan. She moved out of her dorm and went to stay in Roxbury with her African-American friends.

  Later she said she felt she had spent that summer “underground.” Perhaps after her privileged upbringing, life in what was still a dangerous neighborhood, full of drug abusers and prostitutes, came as a shock. She evidently changed her mind about the young doctor who wanted to marry her, for the Siddiquis soon called the Khans to say they accepted the proposal.

  After the FBI determined that two right-wing Americans had planted the bomb in Oklahoma City, Aafia didn’t hear from them again. She went to Chicago to join her sister, Fowzia, who had recently graduated from a Pakistani medical school and was starting an internship in Chicago.

  The nikhah ceremony linking Aafia and Amjad in marriage took place in a Chicago hotel room on October 2, 1995, the day after Sheikh Omar and his followers from Al-Kifah were convicted in the plot to blow up New York City’s landmarks. Aafia wore a white silk dress with pearls. She formally agreed to the marriage in a phone call to Karachi, where her parents were assembled with the Khans, including Amjad.

  After that Amjad flew to Chicago to meet her. He and his parents all knew about Aafia’s passion for jihad—the mothers, after all, had met at her speech. But it never crossed his parents’ minds that the bride herself might have asked the mufti to pose his mysterious question about Amjad’s willingness to go for jihad—much less that his answer, “God willing,” would strike Aafia as a personal commitment to a war against unbelievers.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Ayaan rented a room in a suburb of Leiden and bicycled to classes at the university. She also kept working as a translator. She was making far more money than most of her fellow students, yet she couldn’t help noticing the contrast between the young Dutch she met and the immigrants for whom she translated. The Dutch students had nothing more to worry about than their grades. Ayaan was translating in police stations and hospitals for Somali girls who had been raped and beaten. She was telling refugees that the authorities had decided to send them and their families back to war zones. She was explaining to doctors that pregnant women wanted abortions. In these emergency rooms and women’s shelters, “I began to notice how many dark faces looked back at me.”

  What made her angry was her sense that the Somali women got no support from their religion or community. “I knew many Dutch women were abused, too. But their community and their family didn’t approve of it. No one blamed them for the violence or told them to obey better.” She had a case in which a Somali child had been accused of beating up other children. A Dutch teacher kept trying to explain to the parents that in Holland a child wasn’t allowed to hit another child, even if he was badly insulted. The Somali parents couldn’t understand that. “In Somalia, you attack. You hit first. If you wait to be hit, you’ll only be bullied more. I was taught that, too,” Ayaan had to tell the teacher. “Where we come from, aggression is a survival tactic.”

  The students at Leiden knew nothing of this other world. Leiden seemed like paradise to Ayaan. “Imagine,” she said. “Everybody is reasonable. Everybody is tolerant. Everybody is happy. Your biggest worries are, ‘Will I get my points?’ and ‘Do I have a boyfriend?’ and ‘Did I party well last night?’ And then you have vacations.” One day some of her friends declared that they were going to take her drinking. “And I said, ‘I can’t, it’s forbidden by God; I’ll go to hell.’ And they said, ‘Wooah, that’s cool.’ And my first drink was a martini. After one glass, I was completely drunk.”

  Most students in Leiden lived in student houses, cooperatives owned and managed by groups of students. A Dutch friend suggested that Ayaan apply to live in hers. Each newcomer had to be approved by the other members of the house, and Ayaan’s friend worried that she might not make it. Despite her charisma, Ayaan was just so different from the average Leiden student. But the residents proved more open-minded than Ayaan’s friend had feared. Ayaan was admitted.

  It was March 1996, and within days of moving in she met the man who would become her first serious boyfriend. Like her, Marco van Kerkhoven was older than the other residents. He had gone to the university but was now working as a freelance science reporter. He was slim and very pale, with a thick mop of light brown hair and what Ayaan described as “big blue innocent eyes.” After their first night, Ayaan and Marco stayed together for five years. “She was a beautiful woman and very intelligent,” he told me later. “We clicked instantly.” He loved her joy in life, her optimism.

  Marco had studied biology. He hadn’t grown up with any religious belief. He found it strange to be in a relationship with a Muslim, but his immediate response was to ask questions. “I was very curious and I asked about everything.”

  Ayaan told him she wanted to learn about politics. “She wanted to know about power and how power works in a general way. It is an interesting subject and I got interested in her.” The two of them watched the Nova television news nearly every night. Marco was fascinated by the way watching the same program could lead them to such variant conclusions. “The way she experiences the world is just so different,” Marco said. The childhood she described to him seemed like one of utter poverty and abuse. Yet she was much more cheerful than the average dour Dutchman. “I guess if you start life with nothing,” he said, “every day is a lucky day. . . . There is not a day that Ayaan does not wake up smiling. She always sees the sunny side of things. She is always laughing.”

  Ayaan enjoyed her studies but struggled with some subjects, statistics in particular. Still, she persevered. If she failed a course she took it again. Marco admired her all the more for her drive.

  Marco’s friends also liked her. She had inherited her father’s gift for storytelling. Fellow students recall how Ayaan enthralled them with tales of growing up in Africa and working as a translator in a seamy immigrant underground that they hardly knew existed. They found her beautiful as well. The photographer Marc de Haan took her picture for the student magazine. He was struck by how relaxed she was about it. “Most women are a little bit shy in front of the camera. But Ayaan was nothing like a classical refugee. Posing came completely naturally to her.” Eventually Marco became resigned to the fact that other men were constantly attracted to his exotic girlfriend. “If you were a lovely, baby-faced woman, people would fall in love with you,” he said. “And people do fall in love with Ayaan. People fall for her instantly.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “First marriage, then love.” That’s the motto among Muslims. Aafia believed it, and so did the shy and serious husband who flew to Chicago to meet her in October 1995. At first it seemed to work for them. Amjad had the slim frame, fair skin, and almond-shaped black eyes of a nobleman in a Persia
n miniature. He had grown up in a Pakistani family of three boys and wasn’t used to the company of pretty young women. He was captivated by his new bride.

  Amjad would later say that when he arrived in the United States he was what the Brothers called a “cultural Muslim.” He prayed and fasted and considered himself Muslim, but he hadn’t thought deeply about religion. He knew Aafia was what he called “ultrareligious,” but that didn’t bother him. Still, he didn’t know what to think when his new wife confided that the FBI had come looking for her in the spring and that if anything similar happened again, she would have to leave the United States immediately.

  Surely, he thought, she was exaggerating. But he noticed that other Muslim activists seemed to take her quite seriously, and as he later told the Guardian, it was exciting that “she was so pumped up about jihad.”

  After a honeymoon in Chicago, the newlyweds flew to Boston to start their new life. They rented a tiny basement apartment in Cambridge, but Amjad did not like living in a cellar, what with the constant gurgle of people upstairs flushing their toilets and draining their washing machines. He preferred a modern, larger apartment in the suburbs. Thus, in the first of many moves over the next few years, they found something he liked in the suburb of Malden, in a complex off Interstate 93.

  Amjad had shaved off his beard before leaving Pakistan after hearing that since the Oklahoma City bombing Americans had become suspicious of bearded Muslims. He was in the United States for just one thing—to get his training in anesthesiology—and he didn’t want some prejudice against Muslims to interfere.

  Aafia, however, wanted him to wear a beard. She claimed that Islam required it. And so—in the first of many such inquiries—Amjad consulted various theological works. He learned that though beards were desirable because they set a believer apart from unbelievers, it was permissible to go beardless in the service of a larger Islamic cause—such as gaining the knowledge to save Muslim lives. Aafia, however, didn’t seem to care, and he felt she was embarrassed to introduce her Islamist friends to a clean-shaven husband.

  One day not long after they were married, Aafia came home with the news that she and Suleman Ahmer of Benevolence International had come up with a plan for her and Amjad to go to Bosnia. The Dayton peace accords had been signed the year before. Under the agreement, irregular foreign fighters would leave the country while U.S. troops enforced the peace. But the Global Relief Foundation had distributed a flier in the United States warning Muslims not to be fooled into thinking they should abide by the agreement. Mujahideen recruits were still needed. They should create “a nightmare for U.S. troops in Bosnia” and encourage the Bosnians “to stay true to their Islamic values and open their mind to love of Jihad and martyrdom for the sake of Allah.” Aafia told Amjad excitedly that she could teach religion there while Amjad practiced medicine. Finally they would enter the “fields of jihad.”

  Amjad was startled to hear it. He told Aafia gently that he couldn’t possibly leave the United States until he finished his residency. Aafia was disappointed. But she soon discovered that she was pregnant, and that settled the matter.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Unfortunately for Ayaan, just as she was embracing Western culture her sister was rejecting it. There was more to it than loneliness. By the time Ayaan moved into her student house, Haweya turned her mirror to the wall. She began praying—and reading the Islamist classics by Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. She told other Somalis she was hearing voices. She began to talk about the Dajjal and the return of Jesus Christ.

  Sometimes when Leo Louwé and his wife went to see Haweya, she seemed her old self. Her eyes would flash, and she would make them laugh with her tales of her latest encounters in Holland. At other times, she refused to leave her room.

  One day Haweya announced that she was moving to Nijmegen, an ancient city not far away, on the Maas River near the border with Germany. Some of her fellow clansmen already lived there. Haweya told the Louwés that she had been accepted to study public administration at Nijmegen University. “We never knew how she did that, but that was Haweya—always something new,” Louwé said.

  At the end of August, Louwé and his wife packed up Haweya’s belongings and drove her to a student house in Nijmegen where she had taken a room. Not long afterward, they drove to Nijmegen to visit. But when they asked for Haweya at the student house, the other residents didn’t seem to know who she was. The Louwés tracked her down, and she seemed out of sorts. They got the feeling she had kept to herself since their last visit. “She was very much alone.”

  Ayaan would say that it was as if her sister had nothing to live for now that she had the freedom to do as she liked. To Ayaan, it was almost as if Haweya missed the drama of quarreling with their mother in Nairobi. Holland was so gray and rainy; life could be so humdrum. One was constantly filling out papers, and the Dutch were always admonishing others to plan ahead, to save, to conserve. It brought Haweya down.

  Ayaan had to struggle with the Dutch grind, too. She wanted to live for the day, whereas Marco always worried about saving for the future. Not long after they began seeing each other, he moved into his own apartment in Leiden. Ayaan applied to the city council for a flat with two bedrooms, and the council found her a nice one on the Langegracht, across from the police station. When she couldn’t afford it on her own, she talked Marco into leaving his new apartment and sharing hers. He laughed about it later as the first of many expenses that he felt Ayaan manipulated him into. “Okay,” Marco said, “I didn’t really want to do it at the time, but it turned out fine.” They moved in on January 1, 1997.

  Haweya joined them for a New Year’s celebration. She seemed to be feeling better. But one day Leo Louwé got a telephone call. Haweya had been taken to a psychiatric hospital in Nijmegen. She was suffering a severe psychotic disorder. Louwé and his wife rushed from their village to the clinic, but when they found Haweya sitting in the garden she cursed them and called them “dirty Christian dogs.” “I didn’t start crying, but I was very surprised,” Louwé said. The staff at the clinic told him she had been sleeping with the Quran under her pillow.

  Ayaan and Marco hurriedly drove two hours to Nijmegen, where they found Haweya in a kind of religious mania. She had been smashing her head against walls, shouting, “Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!” She was also raving about Jesus. In Somalia, people would have assumed she was possessed. Marco, the science journalist, told Ayaan that in the West psychiatrists saw such religious outbursts as expressions of chemical imbalances in the brain. Either way, Haweya’s behavior was terrifying to watch.

  The prince of their subclan, Yassin Musse Boqor, who had visited Ayaan when she had first arrived in the Netherlands, also visited Haweya. His eyes misted over later as he recalled her illness: “Haweya, she is coming to be sick. She comes very sick, and she is in the psychiatric hospital in Nijmegen. Since I was living in Nijmegen, I cared for Haweya. Every day, she can’t eat, I fed her. Ayaan comes one time per week because she is busy for university. Sometimes she comes with me and lives in my house to visit Haweya.”

  Yassin Musse Boqor often talked by phone with Ayaan’s father about clan business. He told Hirsi that Ayaan was studying at university and taking good care of her sister. He urged Hirsi to get in touch with her. One night the phone rang at Ayaan and Marco’s apartment. It was Ayaan’s father calling her from Somalia. Despite all their differences, he was still her father and the man she most wanted to impress. Ayaan wrote that she wept and wept. “It was one of the most beautiful days in my life.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Aafia’s parents talked her into getting a doctorate in neuroscience. Her mother said that even if Aafia became an Islamic preacher, having a “Dr.” in front of her name would heighten her credibility. Aafia applied to Brandeis University to work toward a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience, and when Brandeis accepted her, she began studying there in the fall of 1995. She was seven months pregnant at the time and still disappointed that she and Amjad h
adn’t gone to Bosnia.

  Brandeis seems a strange choice. The university could be described as a flagship of Enlightenment Judaism. Founded in 1948 by American Jews fed up with Ivy League quotas, it prided itself on not discriminating against students on the basis of religion. Yet it retained a strongly Jewish character—an odd fit for a devout Islamist like Aafia.

  Amjad has said that his wife chose Brandeis for its convenient location in the Boston suburb of Waltham, for its excellent scientific reputation, and for its offer of generous financial aid. Around the same time, though, Aafia began reading books about the tactics of deception and about the Israeli spy agency, Mossad. Perhaps she saw herself as getting to know her enemy.

  She must have been conspicuous when she showed up on campus, heavily pregnant and dressed in her Muslim head scarf and long dark gown or jilbab. It wasn’t her clothes, though, that got her in trouble for the first time in her academic career, and it wasn’t the anti-Semitism that she kept to herself. Instead it was a conflict she had with the university’s commitment to secular, rational principles. What puzzled Brandeis was that it hadn’t happened earlier, when she was an undergraduate or even in high school.

  Brain science was very much the family field, what with Aafia’s father a neurosurgeon and her sister training to be a neurologist. For most scientists, however, the term “science” itself implies a commitment to a certain type of truth that can be determined only through reason, experiments, and careful observation. Aafia saw things differently: for her the scientific method was a tool in the service of religion.